The Disguises We Wear

This video has gone viral over the last few weeks. I found it on Youtube, but is quickly become a repeatedly linked to video from blogs like this all over the interent.

At first it seems like just a cute video, but we need to stop and stay here for a moment.

The man in the cute bear costume; his name is Fabian, and he has a disability.

The disability makes him different, and for the rest of us different is uncomfortable. As a result we make sure there is a lot of extra space between him and us.

Without that costume and mask, Fabian goes through life alone.

This video asks us to stop and think on that.

With this video front and center in our thinking, I want us to consider something else. I want us to consider how similar we all are to Fabian. In our crazy coming and going we expect the seat on the bus next to us to be empty. We expect to travel life alone. We compare ourselves to our neighbors, and we think if they ever saw who we really were, that they would not want anything to do with us. As a result we put on our own masks, and we wear our own costumes.

Despite our tendency to hide, we are children of a promise. We serve a God who sat with a broken Samaritan woman at a well, became close friends with men and women of the most foul of reputations, stood between an adulterous woman and a stone wielding crowd, and told broken Zachaeus to climb down from his tree. In these moments is our reminder that there is a real you behind the mask and behind the costume; that God loves, cherishes, and chases.

We come to our communities of faith for many reasons, not least of these is to pause long enough to celebrate that we can stop worrying about the broken pieces. We come to those places because once there we are reminded that each and everyone one of us – regardless of what the world may say – is a treasured child of God of infinite value.

It is that child we pray will make the journey without the mask and without the costume. The peace that comes with that recognition is worth celebrating.